During WWII, Japanese schoolgirls were called out of school because of their nimble fingers. They brushed root paste on washi paper and layered it, pasted pieces to pieces across sumo halls, courtyards, school auditoriums. They made paper balloons like this one.

The balloons carried bombs over the Pacific to here. They figured out what’s a jet stream, used to it send bombs up and off and aimed toward the Pacific Northwest. They landed in Thermopolis, Wyoming, and Santa Monica. In Lame Deer, Montana and just outside Detroit. About 300 turned up.

But when the jet stream works, the Pacific Northwest is wet and cold. So hardly anybody died. Except at one Oregon church picnic—a pastor’s wife, a group of children. The pastor dropped them off and went to park. The wife was pregnant, wasn’t feeling well. She found one of these in what was left of the snow, and walked toward it with the children, calling: Look what I found, dear.

Three-time Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough is the recipient of NEA, Cullman Center, and Stegner fellowships. Her books include Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), and Where You Live (Salt, 2012). She directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston and 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online.

On June 6, Jason Mittell, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, delivered the keynote lecture at the Popular Seriality Conference in Göttingen, Germany.

Mittell, who had had spent a year with the Popular Seriality Research Unit in Göttingen, explores the stakes of “the ends” of serial narratives, both how they conclude and how they make meaning—or how audiences make meaning from them. In addition to discussing scenes and thematic threads from television shows such as The Wire, Homeland, and Breaking Bad, he asks:

“Why do serials seem to embrace reflexive meta-storytelling so often in their final seasons, and can this explain why I feel so inclined to talk more about my experiences and process rather than actually presenting my research? Television creators seem to become hostages to their own storyworlds by the final season, so embedded in the process of storytelling that they feel the need to use fiction as an outlet to explore their own experiences, as well as offering closing arguments to prove the relevance and missions of their series.”

It was her best, if a bit outdated: silk from Harada, the print and colors elegant, not too feminine. When meeting another woman’s husband, one ought not overstate things. She twisted her hair upwards and pinned the bundle with a black lacquered kanzashi, revealing a finger’s width of skin above her collar. The first time he’d kissed her there, he’d shuddered. He called her ume, after the mouth-puckering sweet and sour plum.

Afterward, she walked outside. Stooped figures tottered, flesh and clothing hanging from bones like rags. Only a few cried out. It was as if the world had gone mute, as if the air through which sound normally traveled had been vacuumed away. It burned, so they went to the water. After a couple of hours, the rivers filled with bodies. Maggots took up in the limbs of the dead and dying.

Every time she closed her eyes, a bulb flashed and a vision of umeboshi filled her mind. The pickled plum was a deep shade of pink and wrinkled like a grandmother. She couldn’t help but experience, over and over, the moment before the first bite, the way the mouth watered.

Image via Wikimedia Commons –“The patient’s skin is burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the explosion,” c. 1945, National Archives and Records Administration College Park.

Kelly Luce’s debut story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, is forthcoming from A Strange Object in October 2013. She’s currently a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX. Find her online here.

NER contributor Victoria Chang has published The Boss, a new collection in the McSweeney’s Poetry Series.

From Ilya Kaminsky: “To say simply that Chang takes the Modernist’s music and makes it new again, makes it alive, is to say only half-truth, for she truly reinhabits it, re-kindles the flame. This radically new music is political, yes, but it is also ecstatic. It sees how ‘everything [is] green everything grown and aglow.’ And after each firework or verbal surprise or beautiful pyrotechnics comes flame of recognition. Each reader will find her own revelation in this rich collection, some will find fire, others healing, others ecstatic abandon. I, for one, found music.”

Victoria Chang‘s first poetry collection, Circle, won the Crab Orchard Review Open Competition Award. Her second book, Salvinia Molesta, was published by the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR Poetry Series in 2008. She has also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She lives in Southern California and works in business. Her work has appeared in several issues of NER (23.2, 24.3, 25.3, and 33.1).